Oil and gas industry experts have thrown their weight behind Federal Government’s planned removal of fuel subsidy as they believe it has grown into a full-blown cancer that needs to be cut off completely.
This is even as the Nigeria Labour Congres, NLC has stressed that removing fuel subsidy is likely to set Nigeria on fire as it will amount to increased levels of poverty.
“Anybody moving Nigerians in the direction of subsidy removal wants to blow up the country. They can go ahead and blow up the country. But the truth is anything less than refining crude in Nigeria; you cannot push us into that argument.
“We have been down this route before, and it has never paid off. We keep calling it a fraud and that fraud was confirmed in 2016 when they looked us in the face and told us that they have removed the subsidy.
“Any increase in petrol price from the government in the name of subsidy removal, we will challenge it. We will work against it, it is straightforward,” Emma Ugboaja, the General Secretary of NLC lamented.
But these experts maintain that it should end and the funds being expended on it, channeled into other sectors of the economy in dire need of funding.
“We have been massaging this problem and it has become a monster now. We need to encourage the incoming government to dismantle this monster and cut cancer. The government has been paying fuel subsidies all these years, yet, the poverty rate in the country is on the increase,” an oil and gas analyst who prefers to remain anonymous reiterated.
According to him, the country cannot continue to do the same thing and expect a different outcome.
He however thinks the situation can be ameliorated if the government creates a social welfare programs targeted at low-income earners. Perhaps These programs he believes will help Nigerians cope better with the fuel subsidy removal.
Ahead of the planned removal, the Federal Government has received $800 million from the World Bank for onward distribution to 50 million vulnerable Nigerians to help cushion the effects of the fuel subsidy removal.
At the moment, there are over 133 million Nigeriand living in multidimensional levels of poverty. So if 50 million Nigerians benefit from the World Bank largesse, what then happens to the remaining 83 Nigerians living below poverty lines?
Already, there is sceptical across board over the N400 billion that the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC ) Limited has said it is spending on fuel subsidy payments on a monthly basis.
Some Nigerians believe an alternative to the removal of fuel subsidies would be to fix governance failures across all tiers of government and get rid of the corruption within the subsidy regime. Rather than transfer the cost to an already overburdened populace who are battling too many inefficiencies ranging from insecurity to inflation.
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